Tag: case-studies

Hanzo helps early stage hardware companies build and launch products. Hanzo serves in a hands-on and advisory capacity to drive all aspects of early stage growth, including operations, product development, marketing, sales, and support.

The nature of Hanzo’s business requires frequent communication with client teams. As such, Hanzo’s first deliverable is to set up their client’s Slack instance. In order to remain in contact with the client teams, members of the Hanzo team joined client Slack teams. While Hanzo members enjoyed the benefits of being in close touch with the customer in this manner, they also noticed certain usage patterns that proved problematic in an environment where team-to-team communication was critical to the success of the engagement.

Benefits of joining client Slack teams

Real-time communication with core client team throughout the duration of engagement

High visibility into all client team activities and communication flows

Problems with joining client Slack teams

Confusion/information overload associated with joining so many Slack teams

Being a part of the team increased DM (direct, 1-1 message) potential

Frequent DMs meant Hanzo team members did not receive relevant information at the same time

Due to the above problems, Hanzo CEO Zach Kelling sought a solution to simplify his team’s usage of Slack.

Sameroom helped Hanzo restructure their client communication with shared channels between the Hanzo Slack team and client Slack teams.

Since most communication during the engagement involves the Hanzo team providing answers to questions and offering advice, this method turned out to be beneficial, since both the Hanzo and client teams receive all information at the same time (by eliminating DMs entirely) and each retain a copy of the conversation.

This single point of connectivity forced all stakeholders to collaborate publicly, maximized accountability, limited superfluous conversation, and forced focus. Another benefit to using Sameroom included the ability to share Slack integrations with client teams.

Primary functional benefit of shared Slack channels

Hanzo team can respond to client matters without joining client Slack teams

By eliminating DMs, all Hanzo team members can respond and/or view responses in real-time

The Hanzo team can remain in their home environment without switching Slack teams or sharing DM and presence information with outside teams

There were two unintentional benefits of sharing Slack channels

The approach forced good behavior: a single point of connection required all stakeholders to discuss topics in public (as opposed to DMs)

About Hanzo: Hanzo is a creator-first ecommerce platform that helps you quickly build scalable companies, fund innovative products and grow community around invention. Hanzo is made up of complementary features that you can mix-and-match to fit your needs.

Remote service delivery is quickly becoming one of the primary means of completing professional service consulting engagements. The efficiencies associated with delivering expertise at scale in remote scenarios are replete: decreased travel time, expense, and wider access to expertise are only a few benefits achieved by enabling remote professional service teams.

While the efficiencies are clear, there are also drawbacks in the realm of communication and collaboration. Juggling time zones, adapting to new team communication and work styles are a few challenges. Even more complicated, what happens when each party has their own preference of collaboration tool—Slack, Skype, Hangouts? The implication is that teams delivering professional services must be flexible to the needs of the client and adopt new communication tools per engagement. This requires a consultant who have specific domain expertise to spend time setting up new enterprise chat identities with each new client engagement. Each identity's lifespan will last only for duration of the project. In this scenario, valuable time is spent replicating the same activity across every expert for each engagement.

What is the alternative? Instead of using new tools per engagement, teams can standardize on the tools they want to use and implement integrations between internal and external enterprise chat platforms during client engagements. For instance, using Sameroom, Consulting Team A who uses Slack can share private channels with Client Team B who uses HipChat and Client Team C who uses Google Hangouts. By doing so, all parties continue using the tool of their choice. Other key benefits include secure access control, speed of service delivery, and the ability to retain an archive that can be accessed beyond the duration of the engagement.

Aaron Lee of Pythian, a remote managed service delivery organization, sees this concept of internal standardization and integration with external team tools as a way to remove friction associated with the communication stack during consulting engagements. As he builds a hosting model for remote service delivery, Aaron sees how Sameroom can help consulting teams adapt to customer practices while still maintaining ownership of their communication across all experts and client engagements.

About Pythian: Pythian is a global IT services company that specializes in designing, implementing, and managing systems that directly contribute to revenue and business success. Pythian helps companies adopt disruptive technologies to advance innovation and increase agility. Pythian technical teams work as an integrated extension of client organizations to deliver continuous transformation and uninterrupted operational excellence using expertise in cloud, DevOps, big data infrastructure, advanced analytics, infrastructure management, and databases.

RJMetrics is a Philadelphia-based data analytics company. RJMetrics has 85 employees across five departments: Marketing, Sales, Product, Engineering, and Customer Success. Each team uses the best tool for their respective line of business. Tools used include GitHub, Zendesk, Pardot, and Salesforce.

While it is important for organizations to have the productivity and collaboration tools that match the use cases of the teams they support, it can be difficult to create a means to communicate between the silos.

To address this, RJMetrics adopted Slack a year and a half ago to create an internal central communication hub. With the use of Slack, RJMetrics was able to close the communication gaps between internal teams. The next area to address was the communication between the RJMetrics Sales staff and their counterparts at other companies. While these channel partners often cross-sell RJMetrics products and work closely with the RJMetrics sales team, they are not part of the RJMetrics Slack organization.

While email was a viable solution for sharing information, it did not satisfy the real-time collaboration requirement associated with coordinating between high-impact sales teams.

Enter Sameroom. By using Sameroom’s real-time bi-directional Tubes, RJMetrics was able to connect internal sales Slack channels with external sales teams' chat platforms. Sameroom integrations allowed both internal and external teams to seamlessly share information in a setting where conversations and inquiries are visible to everyone on the necessary teams and both teams' companies end up owning the resulting chat history. This fundamentally changed the way RJMetrics communicates with partners, allowing for more efficient communication and shortened sales cycles.

About RJMetrics: RJMetrics helps online businesses make smarter decisions with their data; providing the kind of deep insights that were formerly only accessible by large companies willing to invest in full-time data scientists. With RJMetrics, any company can become truly data-driven.

LiftMedia is a growing UX design agency with six cross-functional team members who work with clients as external team members to facilitate design initiatives. As external team members working in a remote environment, communication tools are important to driving growth through efficiency.

The current suite of communication tools include Facebook, Skype, and Slack. Facebook and Skype are the primary external client communication platforms, while Slack is the primary internal communication platform.

Since Facebook and Skype accounts were not accessible by everyone on the team, the firm’s principal filtered these channels and forwarded pertinent team communication to relevant team members. This process took place during all phases of the project. As such, the firm’s principal became the bottleneck to team communication. In order to increase team visibility of client communication, the team sought a solution to aggregate communication from conversations in Facebook and Skype, and present these conversations in Slack (the primary internal communication tool).

This search led to Sameroom, which LiftMedia was able to use for integrating conversations in Facebook and Skype with channels in Slack. These integrations are real-time and bi-directional.

Diagram of previous communication workflow:

Current communication workflow with Sameroom integrations:

By using Sameroom’s real-time integration platform, LiftMedia was able to achieve their first product launch without the principal involved in project communications.

By increasing client communication visibility across the entire team, LiftMedia is able to ensure that relevant team members receive necessary information in real-time. This streamlined approach will help the team complete projects more smoothly and grow their client base faster over time.